BILL

Why An Interactive Notebook?

You will also be spending a lot of time with something called BILL. In the AP Biology course, students keep an interactive student notebook (ISN), where you will document your learning and interact with course content. Our ISN is called a Biology Interactive Learning Log, and we will use it daily.

On any given day, we could be doing one of the following things in our notebook:

• • Solving practice problems

  • Answering practice multiple choice exam questions

  • Interpreting graphs or diagrams

  • Building models and answering questions about them

  • Creating graphic organizers or concept maps about biology content

  • Writing practice free response questions

The activities we will do in our BILL are meant to allow you to interact with the biology content of our class in various ways. The more ways you interact with biological concepts, the more likely you will be able to apply them to new situations, whether it is a test or a lab investigation.

You will be asked to color code, highlight, ask questions and interact with your notebook on a daily basis, so it is important to bring it to class each day and to keep up with it every day. I also keep a BILL to help you understand where to place items but understand that it is a skeleton and does not have the assignments completed. You are always welcome to look at my notebook to see where items should be placed. Keeping the items inside in order is important in helping you to organize your learning and keeping the flow of course content in a logical order. This will become even more important when you are reviewing for the AP exam in the spring.

To create your BILL, each student will need a 3-inch binder, binder tabs, and removable tabs. We will be placing all notes, discussions, videos, worksheets, and labs within your binder by concepts. A standard notebook can be used to take class notes or looseleaf to keep all notes in their appropriate section of the binder. We will also be using a Lil' BILL, this will be a composition notebook that will be composed of Venn diagrams, reflections, drawings, the conclusions to labs, and etc. You will need to bring your BILL and Lil' BILL with you to class every day, this is where all of your notes and assignments will be placed. For this reason, your BILL will get thick. It is recommended to not use folders since worksheets and labs typically will not stay in sequential order. By the end of the year, you will have a homemade study guide if you follow the guidelines for the BILL.

We will go over how to set up the BILL in class on the second day of class so be sure you have your binder, tabs, and composition notebook.

It is important that you keep up with your BILL and Lil' BILL on a daily basis since this learning log is the physical representation of your processing of course concepts. We will use this binder and notebook in class on a daily basis to catalog all the learning that you do both inside and outside the classroom, so it is important that you have it with them each day.

Adapted from Why An Interactive Notebook? by Lee Ferguson, Allen HS